Diy. Wiki. Csr. Partition. User. Scaling drupal - an open-source infrastructure for high-traffic drupal sites. The authors of drupal have paid considerable attention to performance and scalability. consequently even a default install running on modest hardware can easily handle the demands of a small website. my four year old pc in my garage running a full lamp install, will happily serve up 50,000 page views in a day, providing solid end-user performance without breaking a sweat. when the times comes for scalability. moving of of the garage if you are lucky, eventually the time comes when you need to service more users than your system can handle. your initial steps should clearly focus on getting the most out of the built-in drupal optimization functionality, considering drupal performance modules, optimizing your php (including considering op-code caching) and working on database performance.
John VanDyk and Matt Westgate have an excellent chapter on this subject in their new book, "pro drupal development" incremental steps towards scalability tasty recipes. Dafont.com.